If you manage Google Workspace for your organization, I'm curious about how you usually catch unused or inactive licenses. Do you have a regular schedule for reviewing these, or do you mostly check them on an as-needed basis, like during offboarding or budget assessments? I'd love to hear about what practices are commonly used in the field as opposed to what sounds good in theory.
5 Answers
We have a compliance policy that requires us to deactivate accounts immediately when someone offboards. We move them to a separate organizational unit and archive their data. After backing everything up using Google Takeout, we remove any extra licenses, like Voice, and then delete the account. As for licenses, our organization is always growing, so we've never had to reduce the number of licenses we have available.
In my smaller organization, I check the last activity for all users every few months to identify any inactive accounts.
We handle license management during onboarding and offboarding since it's easy to adjust the number of licenses. The tricky part is ensuring email forwarding and Drive storage are reassigned after offboarding. It took some time for our managers to get organized and provide that info proactively, rather than us having to chase them down later. This way, we can clean up accounts promptly instead of letting things linger.
We switched to M365, but our user management process takes care of license issues automatically. When someone leaves, their account is disabled and the license is removed right away.
You need to automate that, brother!